Carys Davies

Carys Davies is a Welsh short story writer and novelist, born in Wales. She studied at Oxford and has lived in the United States and England. Her short story collections The Redemption of Galen Pike (2014) and Some New Ambush (2007) have won numerous prizes, including the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and the Royal Society of Literature's V.S. Pritchett Prize. Her debut novel West (2018) follows a nineteenth-century frontiersman who travels west after reading about the discovery of giant bones, leaving his young daughter behind. It received widespread critical acclaim and was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize. Her second novel Clear (2023, Granta) is set on a remote Scottish island during the Highland Clearances and follows a mainland Scots man sent to evict the island's last remaining inhabitant. It won the RSL Ondaatje Prize in 2025. Davies is known for the compression and precision of her prose, her spare dramatic scenarios, and her engagement with North American and British frontier and colonial history. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.